At the present time, telephone customers, and particularly commercial telephone customers, select the types of telephone services desired from a broad, but nevertheless limited, range of services available at any given time. For example, one customer (e.g., a business) may elect to communicate between its different business locations by means of a private network and to receive calls from its customers by means of the public toll network. Another telephone customer (business) may offer toll free calling to its customers by subscribing to "SAC" INWATS service. To ascertain what types of services should be available, typically, market analysts in the telephone industry attempt to ascertain the services the public desires and are willing to pay for and to assign developmental priorities to their determinations taking into account available resources. New services are continually being introduced by the telephone industry. Recent examples are expanded SAC INWATS, described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,191,860, entitled "Data Base Communication Cell Processing Method" which issued to R. P. Weber on Mar. 4, 1980, automatic card calling described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,162,377, entitled "Data Base Auto Bill Calling Using CCIS Direct Signaling" which issued to A. B. Mearns on July 24, 1979. Such new services are important innovations. However, these and other available services cannot be expected to meet the needs of all customers.
Perhaps equally important is the fact that there is typically a substantial delay in introducing new telephone services to the market. A lag of several years is not rare between the time a decision is made to provide a specific service and the time the service is actually available. This is due in large part to normal development time and the difficulty of integrating new features into the complicated telephone network structure.
It is an object of this invention to provide a framework within which customers may tailor their telephone services to match their specific needs. It is a further objective to eliminate much of the development effort required for the introduction of new services while also providing a flexible base structure which can be quickly and easily expanded to provide additional new capabilities.